New Music Of The Day: Day Wave – ‘Gone’

Remember that video of The Drums running around some perfect Pacific beach coast at night? Turns out Jackson Phillips AKA Day Wave was parked a few hundred metres up the coast from them, gazing out to sea while nursing a broken heart.

At least, that’s how ‘Gone’ sounds to me, anyway. His last big blog breakthrough tune, a cover of Joy Division’s ‘Ceremony’, was something of a red herring – too doused in Ian, Hooky and Barney’s northern rot to convey the heightened tension that seems to run through his own creations so naturally.

‘Gone’ is his strongest track yet, built on a batch of twinkly guitar lines and see-saw synth lines while Phillips laments a lost soul – someone who, unlike his fellow sad-eyed indie peers Cole Smith of Diiv and Jonny Pierce of the aforementioned Drums, he can’t even bring himself to sing in-depth about. Instead, we get a bunch of self-pitying, desperate cries for help, delivered with a tear by a man who sounds like he’s teetering on the edge – of both brilliance and a breakdown.

Day Wave’s new EP Hard To Read, along with a repacked version of his debut EP Headcase, is released on March 4. The full tracklisting is as follows:

Nothing At All
Total Zombie
Drag
We Try But We Don’t Fit In
Headcase
Deadbeat Girl
Gone
Hard To Read
Stuck
You